For much of the superbly chilling historical drama “Two Prosecutors,” we are inside a Soviet prison in the city of Bryansk, in 1937, during Stalin’s widespread purge of his political enemies in the Communist Party. We know we are inside because the Ukrainian writer-director Sergei Loznitsa has brought us there, step by agonizing step, with none of the shortcuts that might have tempted a less disciplined observer. In the opening moments, Loznitsa, working with the Romanian cinematographer Oleg Mutu, plants the camera before the prison gates, which open with a loud creak, allowing a fresh batch of emaciated arrivals to shuffle into a work yard. An old man, bearded and solemn, is assigned a special task, and the camera watches patiently as he is led up a stairwell, down a corridor, and into a cell with a furnace, where he’s ordered to burn the contents of a large sack. “Don’t think you can hide even a scrap,” a guard warns, for the bag contains evidence: letters written by Party members inside the prison, all protesting their innocence of crimes they’ve been charged with and testifying to experiences of abuse and torture under detainment.
All of this looks and sounds too grim for words, but stick with it, for there is a purpose—and, crucially, an urgent dramatic pulse—to Loznitsa’s deliberation. His filmmaking has an immense physical weight; he wants to convey not only the dreary look of prison, all dim lighting and bare gray walls, but also a crushing sense of immobility, as if the camera, like an inmate, could move only when granted permission. Sometime later, a neatly dressed, sombre-faced young prosecutor named Kornev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) will arrive at the prison on important business, and he, too, is escorted by the camera every step of the way. Doors and gates are slowly unlocked, guards stare impassively from the sidelines, and, eventually, he meets with a politely useless duty assistant, to whom he makes his request known. Kornev has come into possession of a letter from one of the prisoners, I. S. Stepniak, requesting a visit from the prosecutor’s office, so that he can share some “vital information.”
Stepniak’s note, we learn, was written in blood—a detail that likely awakened the letter burner’s sympathy and compelled him, in a courageous (and possibly final) act of defiance, to smuggle the missive out. Kornev’s visit to the prison is another bit of bravery, born of a newcomer’s naïve belief in the system; he was, we learn, appointed a prosecutor only three months earlier. (“Do you know where your predecessor is now?” someone asks, ominously.) In pursuing an audience with Stepniak, Kornev is taking on not only the prison authorities but also Stalin’s secret police, the N.K.V.D. For the next several hours—the film, though extraordinarily rigorous, is not bound by the strictures of real time—Kornev’s persistence will be met with deflections, delays, and excuses. Such a visit requires official permission, he’s told; the prisoner is ill and contagious. “Don’t forget about the risk of infection,” the prison governor says, and there’s more menace than concern in his warning; he’s referring to an ideological contaminant, not a physical one.
By the time Kornev is finally ushered into the cell of Stepniak (a mesmerizing Aleksandr Filippenko), there’s no sense of triumph or even anticipation about what he will discover. Stepniak’s account is terrifying, though not terribly surprising: he is one of many Old Bolsheviks who have been strategically targeted by Stalin’s regime, and his “vital information” is written, in part, in the wounds and scars covering his battered body. Stepniak was also once a lawman himself—he’s the other prosecutor of the film’s title—and Kornev, who regards him as something of a mentor, is determined to live up to their shared ideals. Loznitsa neither sentimentalizes nor mocks this impulse; for him, the human will to resist, to cling fast to integrity and courage in the face of a mounting totalitarian horror, is something as real, as undeniable, and therefore worth acknowledging, as the horror itself.
Loznitsa, who has lived in Berlin since 2001, has been making films for more than two decades, most of them nonfiction. These include “The Invasion” (2024), a portrait of everyday Ukrainian life during wartime, though he has previously revisited the Stalin era in archival documentaries, such as “The Trial” (2019) and “State Funeral” (2021). The director’s easy traverse between past and present, and between fiction and nonfiction, has accumulated its own meaning over time: fascism persists now as it did then, and its horrors are inexhaustible in any medium. So it is with “Two Prosecutors,” which is Loznitsa’s first fictional narrative in some time, though it is informed by real-life experience. The story is drawn from a novella by the Soviet physicist Georgy Demidov, who spent fourteen years in the Gulag as a political prisoner; he wrote it in 1969, but it wasn’t published until 2009, long after his death.
Not having read Demidov’s story, I can’t assess Loznitsa’s adaptation on the basis of narrative fidelity, although there is one purely cinematic coup—a structural doubling—that undoubtedly belongs to him and the astoundingly versatile Filippenko. That doubling underscores the film’s title and its structure, which is ingeniously bifurcated: the movie runs just under two hours, and the second hour, which follows Kornev as he seeks to report his findings to the prosecutor general’s office in Moscow, holds up a brilliantly warped mirror to the first. The Moscow offices are, of course, nicer than the Bryansk prison cells, with wood panelling in lieu of ashen concrete, but even here Kornev is subject to the same evasions and veiled threats, the same pointless waiting games, the same hush of conspiracy that, he realizes too late, has already eyed him as its next target. Loznitsa’s methods are grim and exacting, but the effect is never monotonous; there are shivers of Hitchcockian suspense, plus a whispery cackle of satire that veers toward the Kafkaesque. Whether Kornev is navigating the bowels of a prison or a labyrinth of bureaucratic absurdity, the rooms and anterooms he must pass through are like successive circles of Hell. Once he reaches the core, his sense of entrapment, and ours, is total.
Like “Two Prosecutors,” “Palestine ’36,” the fourth feature from the Palestinian director and screenwriter Annemarie Jacir, unfolds at a politically and existentially precarious moment in the nineteen-thirties. The similarities end there. Jacir’s film, which was short-listed (but not nominated) for the Oscar for Best International Feature, has no use for art-film solemnity. Conceived as a robust classical entertainment, it is blunt and sprawling where Loznitsa’s picture is precise and concentrated, and it pointedly frames resistance as a collective rather than a solo enterprise. The title sets the scene: the story begins in British-controlled Palestine, in 1936, and then tracks, on multiple narrative fronts, the three-year Arab revolt against the mounting injustices of mandatory rule. Chief among these is a British partition plan, well under way, to establish an Israeli state in Palestine; Jewish refugees, fleeing persecution in Europe, are already arriving en masse and building settlements in the countryside. As tension erupts between Jewish settlers and Palestinian rebels, the British police and Army enforce an indiscriminate crackdown on Arab villagers, confiscating their land, enforcing curfews, limiting travel, and beating and arresting any who resist. The Nakba of 1948 is still about a decade away, but its catastrophic legacy has already begun.
In one scene, Arthur Wauchope (a suitably plummy Jeremy Irons), the British High Commissioner for Palestine, is confronted at his office in Jerusalem by a group of female Palestinian protesters, and he offers up a condescending explanation of why so many must be punished for the sins of a few: “As you know better than anyone, the Arab holds the community in higher value than the individual.” Jacir is measured enough to grant this assumption a modicum of truth: when rebels on horseback stop and board a locomotive, what ensues is less a great train robbery than a great train fund-raiser, in which the Arab passengers part happily with their possessions (“For the revolution,” a woman declares, surrendering her jewelry). Elsewhere, though, as events gather pace—the Arabs stage a months-long general strike, the British launch an investigation into the roots of the Arab-Jewish conflict—the film productively undermines the notion of an easy, monolithic Palestinian solidarity. Its strength lies in the creation of characters who, although sometimes forced to function stiffly as rhetorical mouthpieces, seem genuinely conflicted and caught off guard by the brutal interventions of history.
The first character we meet is Yusuf (Karim Daoud Anaya, in a soulful-eyed screen début), a farmer’s son from the village of Al Basma, who, longing to slip the bonds of rural life, begins working in Jerusalem as a driver for a wealthy newspaper owner, Amir (Dhafer L’Abidine). But rising tensions and encroachments keep pulling Yusuf back to Al Basma; at one point, he is called upon to represent the interests of impoverished Palestinian farmers, who are at risk of losing their livelihoods—not just to Jewish settlers but to the wealthy Palestinian landowners who are happy to sell off their fields for higher profits. “Is Zionism really so bad for us? For business?” one of them asks, and his question will hang over the picture like a miserable portent. Amir, who has set his sights on political office, proves similarly amenable to the British agenda—to the chagrin of his activist wife, Khuloud (Yasmine Al Massri), who has been writing about the village conflicts in Amir’s newspaper. (In a nod to the sexism of the era, Khuloud has to employ a male pseudonym to be taken seriously.)
Jacir has approached questions of Palestinian identity in all of her previous features; “Salt of This Sea” (2010) and “Wajib” (2018) were both set in the present day; “When I Saw You” (2014) takes place at a Jordanian refugee camp in 1967. Venturing deeper into the past, “Palestine ’36” is an ambitious work. Jacir’s skillful evocations of pre-Nakba Palestine, particularly her images of a bustling, thriving Jerusalem, have the quality of a sun-drenched paradise lost. (The film was shot in several Palestinian locations after the attacks of October 7, 2023.) These scenes are supplemented by occasional archival clips from the period, which offer us a rare glimpse of Jewish refugees up close. They are otherwise undifferentiated and undramatized, in what feels like a strategic corrective on Jacir’s part—a refusal to grant them a narrative primacy that Palestinians have long been denied.
Even so, there’s a mercy in the omission. “Palestine ’36” is anti-colonialist to the core, and Jacir reserves her most damning critique for the High Commissioner and his colleagues. The film’s most odious villain is Orde Wingate (Robert Aramayo), a British Army captain and Christian Zionist who leads the brutal crackdowns on Palestinian villages. On the opposite side is the High Commissioner’s thoughtful, compassionate secretary, Thomas Hopkins (Billy Howle), who is sympathetic to the Palestinians’ plight and tries to advise them at every step, to little avail. Hopkins is, perhaps, the closest thing this story has to a Kornev—a principled outsider who ultimately overestimates the value of his own empathy and knowledge. Exasperated by the fruitlessness of his labors, Hopkins finally declares, “I quit Palestine!” Jacir is not, I think, unsympathetic to such a response, but she also doesn’t grant it the final word. “Palestine ’36” ends on an evocative image of peaceful protest—a long and ongoing march toward justice that extends from its era into ours. ♦
